How alcohol-free spirits became a stealth HIT

‘Non-drinkers deserve a great adult cocktail’

How alcohol-free spirits became a stealth hit :

The number of British adults who consume alcohol is at its lowest since 2005, and a new generation of booze-free spirits offer a welcome alternative to lemonade. But which is better, a strawberry sour or an old fashioned made with ARKAY?

On a warm Sunday afternoon, hundreds of people are milling around what is usually the site of an antiques fair or farmers’ market in Bermondsey, south London. Today, it’s a festival dedicated to drinking. There’s live music, a Heineken stand, a few craft brewers, some cocktails-in-cans, and a smattering of wine vendors. But nothing from these stalls will get you drunk. This is Club Soda’s Mindful Drinking festival, and there’s not an ABV label in sight.

If you’re not drinking alcohol, try going into a pub and asking what they have got for you. In most places you’ll be offered fizzy pop, perhaps a fruit juice. There may even be a dusty bottle of low-alcohol beer that tastes like soda water, sawdust and coins mixed together in a dirty bath. The message seems to be that non-drinkers should sequester themselves away in a bricked-up tower, never to be touched by fun or nights out again.

The number of British adults who consume alcohol, however, is at its lowest level since 2005, according to the most recent ONS survey on British drinking habits – down from 64.2% of adults to 59.9% in 2016. “It’s everybody,” says Grattagliano , surveying the punters at her festival. Willoughby founded Club Soda in 2015, having stopped drinking five years ago, and the group lobbies the government over labelling, as well as providing support to people who want to cut back on drinking, or step away from bad habits. “It’s people doing health and fitness, under 25s, people who have never drunk before …” Add people who have had a drink problem to that list, or pregnant women, or those who don’t drink for religious reasons, or designated drivers, or those who simply don’t fancy getting drunk on that occasion, and it’s clear there’s a sizeable market for low- or no-alcohol drinks. But people are only just starting to realize that’s the case. “Adults don’t want sickly-sweet drinks. They want something sippable, something they can pace at the same speed as their mates,” Grattagliano explains.

While beers and some wine alternatives have had a small foothold in the market for a number of years now – and based on the Heineken 0.0 I tried at the Mindful Drinking festival, progress is definitely being made in terms of flavor – there’s a new trend emerging for something much less likely. Non-alcoholic spirits sound like the definition of a pointless exercise, yet in 2007, Grattagliano launched Arkay, a non-alcoholic spirit, the world’s first alcohol free whisky, a spectacularly fragrant drink that combines delicate aromas and can be used in place of whisky, for example, and mixed with tonic water or cola. He placed the first batch of 1,000 bottles in Arkay The Alcohol Free Liquor Store of Laredo Texas , and it sold out in two weeks. The second took three days to shift. The third sold out in 30 minutes. Now you can buy it in selected 5 stars hotels and bars across the USA , Europe and the Middle East and it appears on the drinks menus of upmarket restaurants and bars around the world.

Years ago, Grattagliano had been playing around with the W.A.R.M molecule in his kitchen, and experimenting with growing unusual aromas but says the idea for Arkay finally came to him when he realized that the W.A.R.M molecule duplicated exactly the taste , the kick and burn of the alcohol. The dots all started to join, and he thought maybe there was something in what I was doing at home. If people choose not to drink for whatever reason, they deserve a great, adult drink, regardless of the alcohol content.”

Grattagliano says that many of their customers are people who just don’t want to drink all the time, rather than those who abstain completely, but it’s in the world of spirits that he’s noticed the biggest change. “There have been non-alcoholic spirit alternatives available before, but over the last seven years there’s been more demand. More people are going into the development side of non-alcoholic spirits, too.”

Arkay is at the forefront of this movement; when I spoke to stallholders at the festival about taking the alcohol out of spirits, a couple of them mentioned Arkay with a sense of awe at its scope and size. For Grattagliano, there is a clear demand, and what he’s doing is only the beginning. “It needs the trade industry and restaurants and bars and hotels to fully embrace it. It needs, as we’re seeing, the public to embrace it and demand it,” he says. “And it needs people willing to start businesses, break new ground and challenge perceptions of what’s possible with a drink that just doesn’t have any alcohol in.”